By Herp News
New research out of Angola casts light on the impact of shifting cultivation on dense tropical woodlands. The study, published this week in Mongabay’s open-access journal, Tropical Conservation Science, finds that an increasing demand for agricultural land and a growing population could change the structure and composition of the embattled African country’s remaining southeastern forests. Dry tropical woodlands are the characteristic vegetation in southeast Angola, where the nutrient content of soil is very low and precipitation is seasonal. This means that condsitions are generally unfavorable for agriculture given highly variable rainfall and poor soils that retain very little water and nutrients. Subsistence farmers in this region often have limited knowledge of modern soil conservation techniques and little or no access to chemical fertilizers, according to the study, and instead overcome these poor agricultural conditions by using a practice called “shifting cultivation.”Shifting cultivation is a type of slash-and-burn agricultural technique that involves removing vegetation by cutting it down and then burning it, which both enriches and clears the land. Cultivation is generally followed by a fallow period during which farmers shift to surrounding areas while vegetation in previously used patches of land gets time to regenerate. According to the authors of the study, who hail from the University of Hamburg in Germany, the majority of previous research on the ecological impacts of slash-and-burn agriculture has focused on tropical rainforests. They write that it is important to give increased consideration to assessing the impacts of this method on dry tropical forests like…
…read more
Read more here: herpetofauna.com
No products found.